Heiankyo Alien
Game development history
chance
In 1979, the popular column " Dekigotology " in the Asahi Weekly ran a series introducing video games developed by university clubs. Games from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Tokyo University of Science) and the University of Electro-Communications MMA were introduced, followed by an interview with the University of Tokyo.
The reporter first went to the Tokyo University Microcomputer Club (a different group from TSG), but the games they showed him seemed a bit lacking, so he asked the Theoretical Science Group (TSG) to interview them, but TSG wasn't working on any games at the time.
They quickly brainstormed on the sofas just to the left of the entrance to the lobby on the first floor of the Komaba Student Hall , and Kawakami and his team came up with the idea for Heiankyo Alien. They explained their idea during the interview, and it was published in the Asahi Weekly. ( the University of Tokyo Microcomputer Club's game was also featured.)
However, at this point it was just an idea on paper and had not yet been programmed. Later, when the members of the group created a program on an Apple II (using BASIC), offers came in from Namco, Sega, and Denki Onkyo , who had read the article, and Denki Onkyo brought a concrete commercialization proposal and commercialized it.
The members of TSG involved in the development were Takashi Arakawa (former Toshiba Engineer), Mitsutoshi Tabata (former IHI engineer), Itaru Kawakami (Sony -> Institute of Fukan Technology ), Arimasa Takeshige (founder of Hyperware Corporation, 16th patriarch of Takeshige Honke Sake Brewery ), Keiichiro Shimada (former Sony exec), and Akiyoshi Ito.
Idea
The original idea was to "set up cockroach traps in the living room to catch the cockroaches crawling around." However, the found that this would give the player too much freedom, so the field was laid out in a grid pattern. At the time, the movie Alien had just been released, so one of the members insisted, "We really should introduce Alien," so the cockroaches was changed to aliens and the cockroach traps to pitfalls.
As the field would be a town laid out in a grid pattern, several names were suggested (Chang'an, Sapporo, San Francisco, etc.), and from these the name Heiankyo was chosen, and the general framework of the game was solidified.
It can be said that the exquisite name "Heiankyo Alien" is what gave this film its impact .
At the time, the "Slit-Mouth Woman" was popular, and as a way to avoid the aliens, a "Tortoiseshell Candy Button" was provided, based on the popular myth of the Slit-Mouth Woman's tortoiseshell candy. The tortoiseshell candy button was a button that gave the alien candy, and if you pressed the button at the right time when you came into contact with an alien, the alien would lick the candy and become motionless for a while, allowing you to escape. Up to three tortoiseshell candies could be used, and they served as a substitute for remaining lives.
However, the arcade game equipment at the time was not compatible with the one-lever, three-button configuration, so the "tortoiseshell candy button" was removed from the arcade version, and the conditions were changed to "if you die three times, it's game over," just like other games.
Arcade game development
Denki Onkyo Co., Ltd. , which commercialized the arcade version, was a company that manufactured audio components and arcade games and was headquartered in Ota-ku, Tokyo.
The hardware for the arcade version was an arcade game machine that Denki Onkyo had previously produced (a copy of Sega's Head-On (1979)), with some modifications to the sound etc.
The software was developed by TSG members in the office of Denki Onkyo, with the plan to complete it in a month over the summer vacation period of the university. Denki Onkyo's plan was to simply port the already-working Apple II version, but in reality it was all reprogrammed from scratch.
It was announced at the Amusement Machine Show in Harumi, Tokyo on October 19, 1979, and released early the following year.
TSG is not involved with Denki Onkyo's next project, Dancing Queen.
Because the hardware was a copy and was widely available, it was easy to make imitations by simply copying the ROM (the memory in which the program is written). As the result, the majority of the arcade versions that were actually available in the market were made by other companies and could be called "copies of copies." As a result, there are very few genuine arcade versions made by Denki Onkyo that remain.
The rights of arcade version of this game's program code were purchased by Denki Onkyo, so after the company was absorbed by Murata Manufacturing, the rights of the trade mark were left hanging for a while, but then the rights were transferred to Hyperware Co., Ltd., run by Takeshige Arimasa, a development member of TSG.
